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Comment by palmotea | Hacker News Reader

> Faced with a legal order that would have required it to change the security architecture on which ADP depended, Apple found a third option: stop offering the feature that made this dilemma exist in the first place. It reverted affected UK iCloud data to Standard Data Protection, where Apple does hold the keys and can respond to lawful legal procress (except the baseline categories that stay end-to-end encrypted either way). This satisfied the underlying legal requirement without ever building a ‘backdoor’.

Maybe Apple should withdraw all encryption support from all UK government accounts? The Prime Minister can use a Huawei or some chunky thing from a military contractor.

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The UK is currently demanding that Apple install mandatory OS level client side real time scanning malware on every device, bypassing all security and encryption to monitor everything. Its an insanely evil and completely unacceptable demand.

Apple should withdraw from the UK until the UK government learns to respect encryption and privacy.

Yep, normalize US tech bros punishing a democracy for some laws. What could go wrong? "I never thought the leopard would eat MY face?!"

Normalize doing whatever we can do protect rights regardless of how many assholes voted to violate them.

Apple is a private company. They don't have to comply with these demands if they don't agree with them.

I'm a Brit and I've advocated that Apple pull out of the UK over this. It annoys me that these companies seemingly have no principles and will just comply with our government's authoritarian demands. As a citizen there's nothing I can do, so it's really annoying that those who could be doing something choose to do nothing for a little extra profit.

Some laws that are fundamentally incompatible with democracy.

- Which party do I vote for to reduce the attacks on encryption?

- Which party do we vote for if we don't want the government to keep pushing digital id?

- Which party is committing to stopping facial recognition trials at London Underground stations?

Conservatives and Labour both push for the same things. With Reform's anti-immigration stance, I wouldn't bet on them finding some magical solution that doesn't involve even more demands for constant identity verification to prove you're allowed to be here.

Since last year, you now can't register a company in the UK without having your face scanned. Face scans are also now a very common requirement to open a bank account, get a tech job, buy a property, rent a property. I don't recall being asked to vote on that?

If you vote Democrat next election, will the US stop taking the fingerprints of every visitor upon entry?

All the political parties are completely apathetic about these sorts of issues.

The notion of democracy is used to justify and legitimise things that people don't get to vote on.

> UK is currently demanding that Apple install mandatory OS level client side real time scanning malware on every device,

it is?

Well in the article they explicitly said they can’t turn off ADP by design, so no luck. But I’m all for making the politicians suffer the consequences of their own decisions.

How are they allowed to even offer e2ee Keychain/iCloud Passwords for example? Isnt that subject to lawful access too?

Exactly my question as well.

Especially since big tech is steaming ahead to mandating passkeys that only they are allowed to control/backup. Not long until all governments could intercept your passwords to all services.

That is exactly the question. I took a look and we presented some of our findings at DEF CON 34. There are paths to decrypting e2ee secrets without the passcode, some of these paths are considered vulnerabilities and have received patches (CVE-2026-28864).

Could you talk more about that? Like some of the vulns?

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